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The mental representation of social connections: generalizability extended to Beijing adults.

ABSTRACT: Social connections are essential for the survival of a social species like humans. People differ in the degree to which they are sensitive to perceived deficits in their social connections, but evidence suggests that they nevertheless construe the nature of their social connections similarly. This construal can be thought of as a mental representation of a multi-faceted social experience. A three-dimensional mental representation has been identified with the UCLA Loneliness Scale and consists of Intimate, Relational, and Collective Connectedness reflecting beliefs about one's individual, dyadic, and collective (group) social value, respectively. Moreover, this mental representation has been replicated with other scales and validated across age, gender, and racial/ethnic lines in U.S. samples. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the extent to which this three-dimensional representation applies to people whose social lives are experienced in a collectivistic rather than individualistic culture. To that end, we used confirmatory factor analyses to assess the fit of the three-dimensional mental structure to data collected from Chinese people living in China. Two hundred sixty-seven young adults (16-25 yrs) and 250 older adults (50-65 yrs) in Beijing completed the revised UCLA Loneliness Scale and demographic and social activity questionnaires. Results revealed adequate fit of the structure to data from young and older Chinese adults. Moreover, the structure exhibited equivalent fit in young and older Chinese adults despite changes in the Chinese culture that exposed these two generations to different cultural experiences. Social activity variables that discriminated among the three dimensions in the Chinese samples corresponded well with variables that discriminated among the three dimensions in the U.S.-based samples, indicating cultural commonalities in the factors predicting dimensions of people's representations of their social connections. Equivalence of the three-dimensional structure is relevant for an understanding of cultural differences in the sources of loneliness and social connectedness.

SUBMITTER: Hawkley LC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3442957 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Experimental studies on polysemy have come to contradictory conclusions on whether words with multiple senses are stored as separate or shared mental representations. The present study examined the semantic relatedness and semantic similarity of literal and non-literal (metonymic and metaphorical) senses of three word classes: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Two methods were used: a psycholinguistic experiment and a distributional analysis of corpus data. In the experiment, participants were presented with 6-12 short phrases containing a polysemous word in literal, metonymic, or metaphorical senses and were asked to classify them so that phrases with the same perceived sense were grouped together. To investigate the impact of professional background on their decisions, participants were controlled for linguistic vs. non-linguistic education. For nouns and verbs, all participants preferred to group together phrases with literal and metonymic senses, but not any other pairs of senses. For adjectives, two pairs of senses were often grouped together: literal with metonymic, and metonymic with metaphorical. Participants with a linguistic background were more accurate than participants with non-linguistic backgrounds, although both groups shared principal patterns of sense classification. For the distributional analysis of corpus data, we used a semantic vector approach to quantify the similarity of phrases with literal, metonymic, and metaphorical senses in the corpora. We found that phrases with literal and metonymic senses had the highest degree of similarity for the three word classes, and that metonymic and metaphorical senses of adjectives had the highest degree of similarity among all word classes. These findings are in line with the experimental results. Overall, the results suggest that the mental representation of a polysemous word depends on its word class. In nouns and verbs, literal and metonymic senses are stored together, while metaphorical senses are stored separately; in adjectives, metonymic senses significantly overlap with both literal and metaphorical senses.

Project description:In French, regardless of stem regularity, inflectional verbal suffixes are extremely regular and paradigmatic. Considering the complexity of the French verbal system, we argue that all French verbs are polymorphemic forms that are decomposed during visual recognition independently of their stem regularity. We conducted a behavioral experiment in which we manipulated the surface and cumulative frequencies of verbal inflected forms and asked participants to perform a visual lexical decision task. We tested four types of verbs with respect to their stem variants: a. fully regular (parler "to speak," [parl-]); b. phonological change e/E verbs with orthographic markers (répéter "to repeat," [répét-] and [répèt-]); c. phonological change o/O verbs without orthographic markers (adorer "to adore," [ador-] and [adOr-]); and d. idiosyncratic (boire "to drink," [boi-] and [buv-]). For each type of verb, we contrasted four conditions, forms with high and low surface frequencies and forms with high and low cumulative frequencies. Our results showed a significant cumulative frequency effect for the fully regular and idiosyncratic verbs, indicating that different stems within idiosyncratic verbs (such as [boi-] and [buv-]) have distinct representations in the mental lexicon as different fully regular verbs. For the phonological change verbs, we found a significant cumulative frequency effect only when considering the two forms of the stem together ([répét-] and [répèt-]), suggesting that they share a single abstract and under specified phonological representation. Our results also revealed a significant surface frequency effect for all types of verbs, which may reflect the recombination of the stem lexical representation with the functional information of the suffixes. Overall, these results indicate that all inflected verbal forms in French are decomposed during visual recognition and that this process could be due to the regularities of the French inflectional verbal suffixes.

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The mental representation of social connections: generalizability extended to Beijing adults.

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